Viscous flow computations of aircraft with changing control surface deflection using unstructured dynamic meshes

A three-dimensional unstructured dynamic mesh method for viscous flow computations is presented to simulate aircraft performance when control surface deflection is changed. The method includes an efficient surface mesh movement algorithm for unstructured hybrid meshes comprised of tetrahedra, prisms and pyramids. The method is applied to numerical simulations of the static longitudinal stability control of an experimental supersonic airplane designed at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (previously known as the National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan). The deflection angles of the horizontal tail wings are changed at freestream Mach numbers of 2.0 and 0.95. The results are validated by comparison with experimental results, and the differences in the flow characteristics at the given flow conditions are estimated. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.